AN INCIDENT AT PLEVNA.

Kumara Times, Issue 468, 27 March 1878, Page 2

AN INCIDENT AT PLEVNA.

J The correspondent of the London j Standard narrates one of those minor incidents of battle, which, while they Are not. important einough 4© (miss inu> history, giv» the tno.«t vivid imgh-etnoa possible of the horrors of warfare. Starting out from, the Czar's headin Itfopipsny a/i aide-de-camp, he climbed the crest 'of a hill where,the Ruffians were entrenched,

and whence a view of the Turkish position could be obtained. He ,gays : " Arriving on the crest, I had a glimpse of the corner of the Turkish position, but as it was dangerous work to lift, even for a moment, one's head above the cover of the pit, no view could be got worth describing. Still, what I did witness, and will endeavor to tell you of, was one of those little episodes of war which strike home its horrors to the heart more deeply than a day's wholesale slaughter. From the Turkish lines stole out five men, crquching, creeping, and running over the broken ground between the lines towards a field of maize, distant some 800 yards from their starting point. Their rifles were j in their left hands, and every now and ■ then, thinking themselves safe from Eussian ken, they would stop as though to see who of them should go on first, and then went on again all of them together. Their object evidently was to gain a corn-field about a hundred and fifty yards from the spot where Keroupate Kine and I were lying, and gather the standing ears, and then back with them to feast on them with their comrades in their trenches. But, alas for them, in this very corn-field the Russians had their rifle-pits; it. was ail over in Jess time than it takes to write. As the five on hands and 'kuees got amid the corn, the Russians leaped from the trenches in which they were hid, and in a moment four Turks, were qnivering under their bayonets. \The fifth had presence of mind enough to fling from him his rifle, and such was his agony of fear and the strength lent by it, that the piece flew same fifty yards. He was pushed down with the butt end of a rifle - and brought in a prisoner. He told, us that hunger had compelled some fifty facing us within the Turkish tren-i-cfan Jo draw lots of five as to who

out and gather froni,the field 'fattwr front "hags fuTI of ears of Indian !*«»,- *ndf;*o iAeae tmlqcky five the ?enance had fallen." ..i